Ciaran Carson is among the most restlessly groundbreaking poets now writing in English. In From Elsewhere, he adds yet another dimension to his poetry and to the act of translation by combining them in homage to the French poet Jean Follain (1903–1971). Carson not only translates the original, but also adds his own poetic rendition, crafting a mosaic of translation and free response. The implications of Follain's poems are often made arrestingly explicit in Carson's versions. The silences ...

In Still Life, Ciaran Carson guides us through centuries of art and around the Belfast Waterworks where he walks with his wife, Deirdre; into the chemo ward; into memory and the allusive quicksilver of his mind, always bidding us to look carefully at the details of a painter's canvas, as well as the sunlight of day. This master translator chooses here to translate the painter's brush with the poet's pen, finding resemblances, echoes, and parallels. A thorn becomes the nib of a wri...

Ciaran Carson's shape-changing genius shines across the volumes included in From There to Here: Selected Poems and Translations. The explosive long lines of his earliest work move to the formal skill and inventive imagination of the middle period, while the concentrated stanzas and intellectual intensities of the volumes after the year 2000 continue his development. In recent years Carson's renditions of Rimbaud's Illuminations as well as his translations and responses to the French poet J...

‘He took out his watch and looked at it. He rested for one minute as timed on his watch. He opened the briefcase and took out a passport and a pair of spectacles. He put the spectacles on and looked at his passport, and realised he was the man in the picture. A gunshot rang out.’Part thriller, part spy novel, Exchange Place is set between Belfast and Paris and tracks the individual movements of two men, John Kilfeather and John Kilpatrick, who are trying to solve a mystery...

‘I write to try to see you as you were, or what you have become. You left no forwarding address: that was part of your intention. For when we wrote those letters to each other all those years ago, we wrote as much for ourselves as for each other.’More than twenty years after the end of their love affair, Gabriel receives a cryptic postcard from an old flame. It is the first of thirteen cards from her, each one provoking a series of reveries about their life and love in 1980s Belfas...

X + Y = K is an astonishing work by the late Ciaran Carson – an electrifying fusion of memoir, ghost story, and speculative fiction that pushes his lifelong preoccupations with memory, time, and perception into audacious new territory. Moving between Belfast and London, the novel traces the fractured consciousness of Kilpatrick, a man haunted by migraine visions, childhood trauma, and the spectral machinery of history. As séances, scientific experiments, and art-historical meditat...

Harry Gill, a moderately successful writer of historical fiction, has been awarded the annual Watercress–Armstrong Fellowship—a living memorial' to the poet, Margaret Rose Hurndell. He arrives in the small French village of Menton, where Hurndell once lived and worked, to write. But the Memorial Room is not suitable—it has no electricity or water. Hurndell never wrote here, though it is expected of Harry.Janet Frame's previously unpublished novel draws on her own experiences in Me...

In 1880, Ada Curtis bore Gerald Howard the first of several illegitimate children. Ada was a housemaid, the daughter of a Lincolnshire butcher. Gerald was her employer and the son of a once-grand family now obsessed with its own threadbare nobility. They thereby sent their descendants tumbling chaotically into the twentieth century. More than a century later, inspired by the stories, reinventions and half-truths in her family's past, Elizabeth Speller - Gerald and Ada's great-granddaughter...

Best known for his provocative take on cultural issues in The Intellectuals and the Masses and What Good Are the Arts?, John Carey describes in this warm and funny memoir the events that formed him - an escape from the London blitz to an idyllic rural village, army service in Egypt, an open scholarship to Oxford and an academic career that saw him elected, age 40, to Oxford's oldest English Literature professorship.He frankly portrays the snobberies and rituals of...

Have you ever found that once you are between the sheets Madame Bovary is too heavy, magazines are too slippery, and The Guns of Navarone too long? In that case A Gentleman's Bedside Book is perfectly designed to satisfy those final moments of the days with facts, stories, ideas and instructions that will help every bright boy to become a smarter man with a well rounded curriculum of lessons in Science, English, Home Economics, R.E, Modern Languages, P.E, Art, Music and Woodwork.

LONGLISTED FOR THE SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE 2014‘A symphonic poem about postwar England and Englishness … A masterpiece’ Financial TimesThe 1950s were not grey. In Jonathan Meades’s detailed, petit-point memoir they are luridly polychromatic. They were peopled by embittered grotesques, bogus majors, vicious spinsters, reckless bohos, pompous boors, drunks, suicides. Death went dogging everywhere. Salisbury had two industries: God and the Cold War. For the child, delight is to b...

An engaging, wickedly funny and splendidly anecdotal memoir of a career spent among writers, agents, publishers and bookmen and women of every stripe.Jeremy Lewis's first memoir, 'Playing for Time', was hailed by James Lees-Milne as 'the funniest and best written book I've read for years.' His second, 'Kindred Spirits', was described by John Carey as 'sheer pleasure from start to finish'. Now he has written a third autobiographical account of his encounters with literary figures ov...